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In 1918, auction house Christie’s helped out with an unusual jewellery fundraiser. Women who had lost loved ones in the First World War were asked to donate a pearl in their memory, and these poignant gems were strung together to be auctioned off to raise funds for the Red Cross Appeal. And now, one of those historic pearl necklaces has been uncovered, thanks to a publicity campaign promoting a book.

 

Pearls Before Poppies: The Story of the Red Cross Pearls, penned by Rachel Trethewey, was released earlier this year and tells the story of this little-known campaign. While we all associate the selling and wearing of paper poppies with the Red Cross, the charity kicked off its post-war fundraising efforts with adornments that were a little more luxurious.

 

During The Red Cross Pearl Appeal of 1918, 4,000 pearls were donated and the gems were strung together to create 41 necklaces. These, along with other pearl jewels such as rings and brooches, raised £85,290, 12 shillings and 4 d for wounded soldiers when they were auctioned off at Christie’s in London on December 19^th, 1918. At the top of the bill was the Norbury necklace, described by the auctioneer as “the necklace of necklaces”, with a string of perfect pearls and a diamond clasp, which sold to jeweller Carrington Smith for £22,000.

 

The campaign was driven Lady Mary Northcliffe, wife of the owner of The Daily Mail and The Times, and the socialites of the day, who would ask their rich friends to release a single pearl from their necklaces to help build up the cache of gems. There were dozens of countesses, duchesses and viscountesses on the organising committee, and well-heeled donors included Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother.

 

Since the publishing of Pearls Before Poppies, author Trethewey has been on a publicity campaign that has included touring the country giving talks about the real-life stories that have inspired her book. During this, one of the original pearl necklaces auctioned off at Christie’s has been found after its owners read about it in Trethewey’s book.

 

The string of natural pearls has been in the same family for almost a century – a constant heirloom since it was originally purchased at Christie’s in 1918 – and is still kept in its original navy velvet box marked with the Red Cross emblem. While the owners, who wish to remain anonymous, have always referred to the necklace as “the Red Cross pearls”, they did not know the full history of the jewel and the fundraiser until reading Pearls Before Poppies.

 

In a somewhat full-circle moment, the necklace has been sent back to Christie’s for valuation. The auction house has placed its value at somewhere between £100,000 and £150,000 – more than the entire total raised for the The Red Cross Pearl Appeal in 1918.

This Friday, a group of five emerging jewellery designers will come together to showcase their work at The Goldsmiths’ Centre in London with a one-day selling exhibition titled All Set.

 

The designers taking part in the All Set selling show are Holly O’Hanlon, Aishleen Lester of Le Ster, Judith Peterhoff, Jessica Jue and Margaux Clavel of WWAN1, who also participated in last year’s pop-up shop at Mare Street Market, organised by The Jewellery Cut and The Goldsmiths’ Company.

 

Each is a recent graduate of The Goldsmiths’ Centre’s innovative Setting Out incubation scheme. The training and mentoring course helps jewellers to build a business around their craft.

 

“Many independent designers launch creative businesses due to an innate passion and a curiosity to play with materials and concepts,” said Peterhoff. “Yet what happens when a maker wants to transform their craft into a business? Having all just completed an intensive year on the Goldsmiths’ Centre’s Setting Out course, we’re extremely proud to be sharing our experiences and knowledge with others, and officially presenting our creative brands and newest collections at this special selling event.”

 

The All Set pop-up selling exhibition will take place on October 25^th, 2019, from 12pm until 8pm at The Goldsmiths’ Centre, 42 Britton Street, London, EC1M 5AD. Entrance is free but visitors must register here for entry.  

It is an emblem of truly timeless style, found on the wrists of trendsetters and fashion icons worldwide, and an instantly recognisable symbol of love and commitment. Yet it was in fact a heartbreak in the 1960s that led to the creation of the classic Cartier Love bracelet.  

 

The story of the Cartier Love bracelet starts in 1959, when a young man from Rome, Aldo Cipullo, emigrated to New York. Cipullo started working for big American jewellery firms, including Tiffany & Co. and David Webb, and became a popular addition to the New York society scene.

 

He was less lucky in love, however, and one night a relationship sadly came to an end. Heartbroken, retreating to his studio at 3am, Cipullo came up with a design for a bracelet that symbolised the permanence of love. A jewel that couldn’t just be slipped off. He fused jewellery and industry; installing screwheads on the bracelet to make it extremely difficult to take off.

 

“What modern people want are love symbols that look semi-permanent, or at least require a trick to remove,” Cipullo once said of his design, which requires a miniature screwdriver to assist in securing or removing the bracelet. “After all, love symbols should suggest an everlasting quality.”

 

At the time of designing this bracelet, Cipullo was working for Tiffany, and wore a version on his own wrist. Despite enthusiastic feedback from friends and colleagues, the firm didn’t pick up the design. No matter, as a few months later, in 1969, the designer made the move to Cartier and pitched it to them as his first design with the company.

 

This was an interesting time for Cartier, and the Fifth Avenue Maison in particular. In 1962, Claude Cartier sold the New York branch, and for the first time since 1847 a Cartier branch was no longer owned by the Cartier family (the Paris and London branches would follow shortly thereafter). The new owners wanted to target younger customers and bring “new life and new blood” to the firm, as Francesca Cartier Bricknell notes in her book The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire.

 

Cartier always had a very strict policy of not permitting designers to sign their works, but with the change of ownership a new direction was taken. Following in the footsteps of their rivals Tiffany, which had been championing their designers, including Jean Schlumberger and Donald Claflin, for years, Cartier allowed Cipullo to sign his work, believing it would add a personal touch that would resonate with young consumers. Aldo Cipullo would be one of only two designers ever given this honour by Cartier. The other was the Vietnamese designer Dinh Van.

 

The launch of the Cartier Love Bracelet was a marketing triumph. Originally, the bangles were made as a set for couples. One couldn’t just walk into Cartier and buy a Love bangle for oneself, it had to be bought as a gift. To reinforce the message of commitment, Cartier styled the bangles as the chic, must-have accessory for famous lovers.

 

If Cartier could have given a pair to Romeo and Juliet, it would have. Instead, it settled for 25 globally famous couples. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw all received pairs, and many of the celebrity recipients continued to wear them for years to come, perpetuating their desirability.

 

It is important not to overlook just how drastically different this bangle looked to the vast majority of fine jewellery offerings at the time. The design is Spartan in its simplicity: a plain oval band of gold, with screwhead motifs borrowed from the Cartier Santos wristwatch. When initially released, the bracelet was made only in 18ct gold and was sold with a gold vermeil screwdriver. Four different sizes were available for him and her, and the Love bracelets cost $250.

 

Cartier quickly did away with the romantic limitations on purchasing just for others, and eventually the brand expanded the range. Since 1970, the Cartier firm has grown almost beyond recognition, but the Love bangle has remained a key part of its portfolio for 50 years.

 

One of the more unexpected elements to this story was the fact that Cartier allowed Cipullo to collaborate with an outside producer and release another version of the Love Bangle. Robert Kenmore, the chairman of the Cartier holding company Kenton Corp, shared with Cipullo an appreciation for a good marketing opportunity. In 1970, the same year as the Cartier release, Cipullo partnered with Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon Cosmetics, to release a gold-plated version of the Love Bracelet. These mass-market alternatives provided the look for less and added to the widespread desirability of the design.

 

Cipullo went on to design a number of other innovative jewels for Cartier. Another of his designs of note was the Juste un Clou bangle (which translates from French as ‘just a nail’) that launched in 1971. At the time, however, the bangle was not considered to be a commercial success and very few original 1971 pieces were made. Although in testament to the idea that good design never goes out of fashion, in 2012 Cartier relaunched Juste un Clou to much acclaim, and it now forms one of its core offerings.

 

The Cartier Love bangle was undoubtedly Cipullo’s most successful design, across all the mediums he worked with – leather goods for Lord & Taylor, china, furniture; he even designed a swimming pool. Cipullo only spent five years as part of the Cartier family and, sadly, in 1984 he died at the age of just 42, but he leaves a lasting legacy in how we see love in a bejewelled form. The simplicity and strength of his designs ensure that he will always be a part of the Cartier story.

When we think of gems, we imagine ancient stones that have been in circulation for millennia, set into jewels and crowns of civilisations long lost. Yet this is not true of all gems. Gemmology is a constantly evolving field, and some of the newer discoveries are the most exciting – such as tsavorite garnet.

 

Though the best-known garnets are deep red, garnets can now be found in a variety of hues including orange, purple and – rarest of all – green. Green garnets are known as tsavorite garnets, named in homage to Tsavo National Park in Kenya near the border with Tanzania. It was here that a rich deposit of the green gems was discovered in the late 1960s by geologist Campbell Bridges, the same man who first found tanzanite.

 

Since their discovery, tsavorite garnets have delighted the high jewellery world. In 1974, Tiffany & Co ran an advert in The New York Times introducing its customers to tsavorite. It told the adventurous tale of the gem’s discovery, with a picture of Campbell and a giraffe in situ in Kenya. To describe this new gem, the ad said it was “far more durable and far less expensive than emeralds”.

Emerald versus tsavorite garnet

With a vivid, clean green colour that required no treatment, it was little surprise that this stone was soon being compared to the famous emerald. And some gem experts, including Eva Gems & Jewels founder Eva Meijer, believe it to be a superior stone.

 

“This is almost sacrilegious to say out loud, but it’s very true from a gemmological point of view,” says Eva, who describes tsavorites as one of her favourite stones due to their natural vivid colour. “Tsavorite has a higher refraction index and nearly double the dispersion of emerald. What this means is that tsavorite garnet will disperse the light more, adding much more life to the stone. In other words, tsavorite easily out-sparkles an emerald.”

 

It is also a more practical stone for everyday wear. “Emerald’s toughness isn’t great,” she points out. “In fact, emerald is brittle. Really brittle. So much so that emerald is not recommended to be set in a ring for daily wear. It can be too easily chipped.” Tsavorite, registering 7.5 on the Mohs scale of toughness, does not have this problem. So, if you find yourself drawn to green gems but have a clumsy side, Eva would advise a tsavorite garnet over an emerald.

A clear sparkle with no inclusions

The other key difference between emeralds and tsavorite garnets is their clarity. While emeralds have lots of inclusions – often a celebrated element of the stone – tsavorites are usually flawless. This can be attractive for those who prefer gems with a clean look.

 

Over the 50 years since its discovery, the price of tsavorite garnets has escalated, particularly in the past few years. When Campbell Bridges died in 2009, his son Bruce Bridges estimates that the price of the gem increased by 800% in the following seven years. “I would liken it very much to when a famous painter dies, their artwork goes up,” Bruce said in an interview with National Jeweler magazine. “I don’t know too many other gemstones that could imagine that sort of appreciation.”

 

For early adopters of tsavorite, this will come as good news. However, those discovering the gem now might be put off by its price, but Eva believes this to be a mistake. “Though considerable, its price remains much lower than most emeralds, but for most people it seems too high as it is a stone they have never heard of,” she says. “This is such a pity. I like to make people aware that they have no idea what they’re missing out on by showing them that this stone is totally worth its price – its quality being superior and its beauty refreshing. I urge people to keep an open mind on these treasures of nature.”

Tsavorite garnets in haute joaillerie

In the rarefied world of high jewellery, tsavorite – a stone far rarer than emeralds – is in demand. In its latest haute joaillerie collection, Sous les Étoiles, Van Cleef & Arpels set the green gemstone next to mauve and royal-blue sapphire cabochons to evoke a celestial, other-worldly clash of colours. The gems, in a multitude of cuts, also featured heavily in Dior’s colourful Tie & Dior high jewellery collection last summer.

 

The famous Glenn Spiro titanium butterfly ring donated to the V&A Museum in London by Beyoncé has titanium wings covered in tsavorites, which flutter when a hidden spring is activated. The British avant-garde jeweller has also been known to set hundreds of tsavorites in titanium, heat treating the metal to turn it a shade of green to match the gems.

 

Though lesser known than the more famous emerald, tsavorite garnets have lots to offer. These rare gems are more affordable than emeralds, are free from inclusions, deliver nearly as much sparkle as a diamond, have a naturally vivid hue and are durable enough for even the clumsiest of collectors. “All these benefits are truly extraordinary,” says Eva. “There are very few gemstones out there that can boast these characteristics. So, you understand why renowned gemmologists Richard Hughes and Vincent Pardieu baptised the stone as ‘the untamed green garnet beauty’.”

Untamed as it might still be, as jewellery enthusiasts wake up slowly to its charms, tsavorite garnet is a gemstone with a bright future, and for lovers of green gems, it is a stone well worth considering.

Historically, the earliest known locality for emeralds was by the Red Sea in Egypt at the so-called Cleopatra mines. Although evidence suggests that these mines were worked intermittently as early as 330 BC, production is believed to have opened up under the Romans around 30 BC – just after the reign of Julius Caesar.

 

From recovered jewellery and paintings, we know that these emeralds were often opaque and commonly used in their natural form or slightly polished. Some pieces were fashioned as cabochons or rounded as beads and frequently drilled so they could be mounted in necklaces or earrings. Presumably, the stones conveyed some artistic, symbolic or religious significance to their owners. Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who died in the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, reasoned that emeralds possessed therapeutic and soothing properties. According to Pliny, “there is no better method of restoring the eyes than by looking at the emerald, its soft green colour comforting and removing weariness and lassitude”. Indeed, green symbolises nature and the natural world, and is often thought to represent tranquillity, good luck and health.

 

Indigenous South Americans treasured and traded emeralds for centuries before western explorers ever arrived. Historians believe they could have been mined as early as 500AD. The Aztecs and the Incas collected them, but would not or could not reveal their sources because they came from tribes in present-day Colombia. It wasn’t until the Spanish conquistadors arrived and looted whatever they could that these large and exceptionally coloured jewels began their rise to supremacy. The legendary Crown of the Andes, fashioned in colonial South America, is one example of how the Spanish revered emeralds. According to lore, its largest stone, now called the Atahualpa emerald, was taken from the last Incan emperor, who was named Atahualpa, by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro.

 

The emerald and gold treasures recovered from the sunken 17th-century Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha give us an idea about the treasures these vessels could have carried. If we knew more about the full extent of the trade and the cargo at the time, we could perhaps better imagine the scope of the extraordinary riches. The Atocha treasure alone was valued at more than £300 million.

 

Since then, emeralds have been discovered on almost every continent, but the best and the most expensive emeralds are agreed to be Colombian. Fine stones have also been unearthed in Zambia and Brazil, and beautiful gems also occur in Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Madagascar, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, but production has never been as extensive.

 

Colombia: The kingdom of green

Emerald appearances are sometimes associated with specific mines. Colombian emeralds are said to have a warmer and more intense pure-green colour and possess a unique vibrancy that gems from other origins never seem to attain. Like Burmese rubies with their apparent fluorescence in daylight, Colombia emeralds emit a kind of glow that’s hard to find in jewels from other localities. The colour appears to be of another dimension that cannot be captured by even the best digital cameras. Perhaps some kind of a 3D manipulation would help, but even then, the exact hues would still be a challenge to reproduce. Zambian emeralds transmit a cooler, more bluish-green presence because of colouration by vanadium rather than chromium. Still, the appearances are similar, and ascertaining origin by colour alone is not really an option.

Colombia produces up to two-thirds of the world’s emeralds, and Colombian emeralds are the standard by which all others are measured. Situated deep within the mountains and 200 kilometers north of Bogota, Colombia’s emerald region has long been plagued by violence as rival families fight for control of the most productive mines.

 

The original Green Wars claimed the lives of an estimated 6,000 people until the Catholic church managed to negotiate a peace agreement in 1990 and enforce it with the help of the controversial so-called Emerald Czar, Victor Carranza. At the time, he was the most influential figure in the emerald industry and controlled an estimated 40% of the country’s trade until he died in 2013.

 

Colombian emeralds are so famous for their striking colours and large sizes that dealers will pay a 20% to 30% premium for them. They may be a challenge to facet due to their uneven distribution of colouring and darker tones closer to the surface or in the ‘skin’. Without careful planning and pre-forming, the finished stones could end up lighter than the original material. The best quality Muzo emeralds tend to have a well-saturated slightly yellowish-green colour, Chivor emeralds are cleaner with a slightly less saturated bluish-green colour. Cosquez emeralds occur in a range of colours and clarities, but the best stones are dark and somewhat bluish-green in appearance.

 

The rise of African emeralds

Zambia is a landlocked African country of rugged terrain and diverse wildlife, with many parks and safari areas. The discovery of large quantities of emeralds there led to a great deal of excitement when they were found in the 1970s.

 

Some of the first emerald crystals yielded stones that were so clean that even dealers suspected them as synthetics. This notion was, however, disproved, and as Tiffany & Co began promoting them for their intense colours, remarkable transparency and relative affordability, Zambian emeralds started to gain recognition and acceptance. Most importantly, the new stones offered consumers who could not afford Colombian emeralds an opportunity to buy beautiful gems at lower prices.

 

The beating heart of Zambia’s 41 sq km Kagem mine is a joint venture between Gemfields and the government of Zambia. About 25% of the world’s emeralds originate here. In 2018, a 5,655ct jewel, nicknamed Inkalamu (the Lion Emerald), was found, and it wasn’t even the largest emerald ever pulled out of there. That honour goes to a 6,225ct emerald mined in 2010. Gemfields named that stone Insofu – the Bemba word for elephant – for its massive size.

 

Last days of the Tsars

Russia became a valuable source of emeralds following the discovery in 1830 of the famous emerald-alexandrite-phenakite deposits on the banks of the Tokovaya River, near Malysheva. They were reportedly first found in a kind of weathered mica schist – a type of metamorphic rock – and evaluated at the Royal Lapidary Factory in Yekaterinburg. Yekaterinburg is Russia’s third-largest city and Malysheva is situated some 90km to the northeast.

 

What is known today as the Malysheva deposit was discovered in 1833, with mining commencing in 1834. Over the years, the deposit has been leased and nationalised and privatised intermittently. Work by artisanal miners continued sporadically from the 1860s. In 1899, the Malysheva deposit was leased to an Anglo-French company, New Emerald Mines of the Urals, which worked the deposits until the outbreak of the World War I in 1914. The Malysheva mine was, at that time, the largest producer of emeralds in the world, and many of the most beautiful emerald and alexandrite specimens on display in London’s Natural History Museum have acquisition labels dating back to the mid-19th Century and originating from Malysheva.

 

The Malysheva mine is believed to contain 80% of the known Russian emeralds and was a significant producer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Production of alexandrite was never substantial, but the gem’s exceptional quality was admired, and they were prized around the world. Nowadays, there doesn’t appear to be much of any kind of mining at this deposit, and new stones rarely appear on the market. Most Russian emeralds are light to medium green in colour and the presence of yellowish-green components is quite common.

 

Don’t dismiss inclusions (and small fixes)

While emeralds without eye-visible inclusions do exist, these stones are extraordinarily rare. Some inclusions are referred to as jardin (meaning garden in both French and Spanish), and may consist of networks of tiny liquid-filled inclusions and tiny fissures that permeate the gem evoking the appearance of a lush garden.

 

Generally, we want gemstones to be clean, but emeralds are among the few gemstones where inclusions are accepted. Still, cleaner is better, and this is why most emeralds are treated. Some are infused with oils, and others are filled with polymer resins. The fillers are selected for a refractive index, which is very close to emerald, and they are ideal for disguising cracks and fractures. Cedarwood oil is the preferred option for Colombian stones, while Brazilian stones are usually treated with resin. The resin treatment is considered to be permanent, but many sellers prefer oiling. The treatments improve clarity and stability, and there is nothing wrong with these processes as long as the buyers are fully informed. Emeralds should not be cleaned in an ultrasonic bath as the oil may be removed. Re-oiling is not complicated, but it’s better just to avoid the bath in the first place.

 

The oiling or infilling of cavities and fractures in emeralds is standard practice and improves their appearance. Stones may pass immediately from the mine into a bucket of oil, and even if sellers wish to remove this oil, traces may remain.

 

The colour of emeralds might give us a clue to their origin, but as there may be a great deal of variation within a single source, gemmological tests and inclusion studies are the only way to identify origin conclusively. Still, the top colour should be obvious from its purity and intensity, regardless of the source location.

 

In my opinion, beautifully coloured Brazilian emeralds are underrated, emeralds from Madagascar are surprisingly clean with bluish-green tints, and Ethiopian emeralds are showing a promising likeness to desirable Zambian gems. Colombia, however, is still king when it comes to the best of the best in emeralds.

 

When we think of diamonds, we think of icy-white excitement – crisp, crystal clear, sparkling in the sunlight. The Sewelô diamond, recently purchased by Louis Vuitton, does not conform to this fantasy, but it is, none the less, one of the most exciting rocks to enter the public eye in a long time.

 

Of the covetable Four Cs, it has but one in abundance. While it is, as yet, uncut, has a colour far from the clearest D grade, and its current dark hue masks any bright spots of internal clarity, it most certainly has the carats.

 

The Sewelô diamond, at 1,758cts, is the second-largest gem-quality rough diamond ever discovered – the first being the famous 3,106.75ct Cullinan, discovered in 1905 and cut into many important gems, including some now set in the Crown Jewels. The largest rough diamond – but not of a quality to be used in jewellery – was the 3,167ct Sergio, found above ground in Brazil in 1895 but thought to have landed from outer space. It was sold to I. K. Gulland of London, which, sadly and mind-blowingly, broke the gemmological wonder up into small industrial drill bits.

 

No such fate shall be suffered by the tennis ball-sized Sewelô, however. Its name is taken from the South African language Setswana, and can be translated as ‘rare find’. The impressive rock, which lives up to its name, was discovered on April 19^th, 2019, at Lucara Diamond Corporation’s Karowe mine in Botswana, on the northern fringes of the Kalahari desert. As diamond mining has evolved, more focus is being put on the use of technology that allows miners to scan the ground to identify large gems and then approach with caution, rather than randomly deploying heavy crushers or dynamite, and Lucara has indeed given some of the credit for getting the Sewelô out of the ground unbroken to its own high-tech XRT circuit equipment.

 

What often remains a mystery for miners when discovering rough diamonds of any size, at least initially, is what will emerge once the cutting process starts. Initial analysis, Louis Vuitton says, suggests that the beneath the thin layer of black carbon blanketing the Sewelô diamond is a stone of “near gem quality, with domains of high-quality white gem”. However, the full extent of the colour and clarity of the diamond remains a mystery for now.

 

Such a financial gamble and unusual black appearance, however, did not deter Louis Vuitton. It has not revealed how much it has paid for the diamond but has said it was purchased in partnership with Lucara, which will retain a stake in the resulting cut diamonds.

 

Louis Vuitton said in a statement: “This was exactly the kind of extreme rarity, unconventional and challenging, to appeal to Louis Vuitton’s sense of adventure and creativity: an extraordinary, idiosyncratic diamond specimen, a wondrous miracle of Mother Nature, mesmerisingly mysterious, with its contradictions of darkness and light, and hidden depths of beauty and lustre, waiting for the right expertise and sensibility to be revealed to the world.”

 

This unconventional beauty is now in the hands of Antwerp diamond cutter HB Company. It is charged with scanning and studying Sewelô, before drawing up a map of the best cuts to make to ensure the diamond yields its full potential; because of the black film covering the diamond, standard equipment was redundant and new nano-technologies have had to be used to do this. The large rough stone is to be cut up into a number of smaller diamonds, and the process is expected to take a year.

 

Traditionally, when cutting large rough diamonds, the shape of the diamond cuts it will produce depends on the position of inclusions – or imperfections – and cutters will choose shapes that avoid those blemishes. Louis Vuitton, however, has given HB Company an additional challenge. Diamonds released from Sewelô will not be proportioned to traditional cuts, but one that pays homage to the emblem of the luxury house – its rounded flower and star-shaped motif that breaks up the LV monogram patterns that have made its luggage and handbags so instantly recognisable.

 

That is, of course, unless a very special Louis Vuitton client has other ideas. In what must surely be a jewellery industry first, and a new benchmark in personalised luxury, Louis Vuitton will offer its clientele the chance to commission their own made-to-order diamonds, cut freshly from the Sewelô block. If knowing the route of your diamond from mine to market is the ultimate luxury, this idea surely takes the concept to a whole new level of extravagance.

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